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Robin Williams’ suicide back in 2014 left millions of people
heartbroken and baffled—how could someone so positive and funny take their own
life?

Now, new revelations by one of the people closest to Robin in
his final years is helping piece together the puzzle. (scroll down for
video)

“It was not depression that killed Robin Williams,” said the
late comedian’s widowed wife, Susan, in an interview with Good Morning America,
“Depression was one of let’s call it 50 symptoms, and it was a small one.”‘

“I’ve spent this last year trying to find out what killed Robin,”
said Susan, “to understand what we were fighting, what we were in the trenches
fighting. And one of the doctors said, ‘Robin was very aware that he was losing
his mind and there was nothing he could do about it.”

In fact, it was this lack of control over his own sanity that
may have driven the famed comedian to suicide, since taking his own life would
have been the final form of control over his own destiny.

Robin’s autopsy revealed that he had developed dementia with
Lewy bodies (DLB). After Alzheimer’s, DLB is the most common form of dementia
and its symptoms include hallucinating, altered mental states, and
deteriorating motor functions.

“I know now the doctors—the whole team—was doing exactly the
right things,” said Susan, “It’s just that this disease was faster than us and
bigger than us. We would have gotten there eventually.”

Susan described patients with DLB as behaving like a “pinball
machine” and that you “don’t know exactly what you’re looking at.”

In his final days, Susan said that Robin would go from “totally
lucid” one minute and then speaking things that “didn’t match” a few minutes
later. But by the last month of his life, his mental functions severely
deteriorated and “it was like the dam broke.”

“In my opinion, oh yeah,” said Susan when asked if suicide was
Robin’s final attempt at control over his life, “I mean, there are many
reasons. Believe me. I’ve thought about this—of what was going on in his mind,
what made him ultimately commit, you know, to do that act. And I think he was
just saying, ‘No.’ And I don’t blame him one bit. I don’t blame him one bit.”